Chapter 7 250 were hugely active in lobbying.” The tobacco industry responded by suggesting that this way smokers are put away as criminals: “One frequent question was about this criminalisation, and of course our answer always was that we didn’t want to criminalize anybody. We just want people to make conscious choices about their children’s health.” In France, all playgrounds have been smoke-free since 15 August 2016.24 The interview shows that the importance of a coherent tobacco-free policy was stressed. People used the term ‘tobacco-free’ rather than ‘smoke-free’ because of the new ‘heat-not-burn’ products and e-cigarettes developed by the tobacco industry. “(...) the tobacco industry is trying very hard to get new products on the market that aren’t directly labelled as smoking products. Especially Philip Morris is really very aggressively promoting new tobacco products, so called ‘heat-not-burn’ tobacco. They say that they are not about smoking. They claim it’s like vaping, but it’s not exactly vaping. It’s something between vaping and smoking: they try to develop a con- fusion between all these products, in order to weaken the legislation”. It was also indicated that a coherent policy with coordinated measures is more difficult to be attacked by the tobacco industry, than a single measure. In France’s experience, a smoking ban in playgrounds is low-hanging fruit and quickly achievable because everyone - including smokers - understands and accepts the importance of children’s health. Interviewees advocated using child health rather than child rights in communication. “We didn’t use the argument of children’s rights; that wasn’t really the topic at that time. And we didn’t need it: most of the time even smokers do support such measures.”
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